This is a good overview of the situation in Hardin, Montana.  I present it here as material relevant to today’s show for those website viewers who wish to participate in the show’s content.  -D.W.

by The Raw Story

A mysterious, reportedly unregistered and almost entirely unknown private security firm by the name “American Police Force” is causing a stir in a small Montana town for apparently impersonating local police.

According to a local media report, APF representatives were recently seen in the tiny town of Hardin, Montana, driving black SUV’s with a peculiar logo and, inexplicably, “City of Hardin Police Department” stamped on the door.

However, Hardin does not have a police force.

The town instead contracts with the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Department for patrols, according to KULR 8 in Billings, Montana.

According to the news agency, APF was never given permission to assume policing duties. Instead, the firm — which the Associated Press reported to be unregistered in government databases — gained its contract with the town on the promise of bringing inmates to an unpopulated prison complex.

An image on KULR’s Web site shows the insignia on the APF vehicles, which has caused some concern on the Internet as being of conspiratorial origin.

APF’s coat of arms, a clearer version of which appeared on the group’s Web site (which had been taken down at time of this writing but is viewable here), shows a double-headed eagle with a red shield and white cross borne on its breast.

The coat appears very similar to the insignia attributed to one Prince Aleksandar Karageorgevich, based on RAW STORY’s analysis of images hosted by Burke’s Peerage & Gentry International Register of Arms. The site notes the coat as hailing from the Royal crown of Serbia.

However, the significance or implied nationality of the insignia’s crown could not immediately be identified.

The double-headed eagle itself has been used repeatedly throughout history by many cultures as a symbol of empire, dominance and power.

Hardin, home to about 3,400 people, is in the state’s poorest county. Its unoccupied, 460-bed prison cost $27 million to construct. The town made national headlines earlier this year when local officials pleaded to have Guantanamo Bay inmates sent to the jail.

Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus and other Republican lawmakers have stood in the way of moving Guantanamo inmates stateside, claiming they would present an increased security risk. The political calculation has led the White House to caution that its promise to close the controversial facility in January may not materialize on schedule.

by Matthew Brown, AP

Montana’s attorney general launched an investigation Thursday into a California company that wants to take over an empty jail in the rural city of Hardin, following revelations that the company’s lead figure is a convicted felon with a history of fraud.

Michael Hilton, who formed Santa Ana, Calif.-based American Police Force in March, came to Hardin last month promising to fill the city’s never-used jail and build a large military and law enforcement training center.

Hilton has a decades-long track record of fraudulent activities and spent several years in a California prison on grand theft charges. A native of Montenegro, he uses at least 17 aliases.

Citing “significant concerns” about the city’s dealings with American Police Force, Attorney General Steve Bullock asked Hardin economic development officials to produce by Oct. 12 all documents related to their dealings with the company.

His office made a similar demand of American Police Force, including information that would back up Hilton’s claims of multiple defense contracts with the U.S government and other agencies.

The launch of the investigation came as some Hardin officials began backing away from American Police Force. The city’s Two Rivers Authority reached a 10-year deal on the jail with the company last month.

But that was never ratified by US Bank, the trustee on the construction bonds used to pay for the 464-bed facility.

Attorney Becky Convery, who helped negotiate the deal, said Hilton overstepped his bounds when he showed up in Hardin last week with three Mercedes SUVs marked with fictitious “Hardin Police Department” logos.

He pledged to donate the SUVs to the city and also offered to provide law enforcement for Hardin for $250,000 a year. That prospect has stirred suspicion among critics that rural Hardin, population 3,500, could be transformed into a privately run police state.

Convery said Two Rivers director Greg Smith had a tentative deal with Hilton’s company to provide law enforcement service, but she said it was never finalized and she was uncertain whether it would be legal.

“We are not at all pleased with American Police masquerading as if they were the police for the city of Hardin,” she said.

Yet other Hardin officials remained loyal to American Police Force despite knowing little of its origins beyond what they’ve been told by Hilton.

“I don’t know that his background has affected his position or his ability to do his work,” said Carla Colstad, a member of the Hardin City Council. “I don’t consider it relevant to what’s going on today.”

Hilton — who came to Hardin last week in a black, military-style uniform — portrayed his company as an international player in the security industry. No records have been found of the extensive U.S. government contracts he claims.

Instead, documents and interviews with Hilton’s associates revealed a history of fraud and criminal activity. That includes outstanding judgments against him in three civil cases totaling more than $1.1 million.

“Such schemes you cannot believe,” said Joseph Carella, an Orange County, Calif., doctor and co-defendant with Hilton in a real estate fraud case that resulted in a civil judgment against Hilton and several others.

Carella, described in court documents as a “pawn” in the scheme, said he was never a willing participant. But he acknowledged partnering with Hilton in other failed business deals after being won over by his charm.

“The guy’s brilliant. If he had been able to do honest work, he probably would have been a gazillionaire,” Carella said.

As for Hilton’s military expertise, including his claim to have advised forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, several associates interviewed knew of no such feats, although one said Hilton had talked of being in the special forces in Greece decades ago.

Most who knew him described Hilton alternately as an art dealer, cook, restaurant owner, land developer, loan broker and car salesman.

Hilton did not return numerous calls seeking comment this week. American Police Force attorney Maziar Mafi referred questions to company spokeswoman Becky Shay.

When asked about court records detailing Hilton’s past, Shay replied: “The documents speak for themselves. If anyone has found public documents, the documents are what they are.”

The three SUVs Hilton brought to Montana have yet to be turned over to the city, which does not have a police force of its own but is considering forming one.

At least one is being driven by Shay, a former reporter who abruptly quit her job at the Billings Gazette to work for American Police Force. She said Hilton offered her $60,000 a year.

The jail deal is worth more than $2.6 million a year, according to city leaders.

His criminal record goes back to at least 1988, when Hilton was arrested in Santa Ana, Calif., for writing bad checks. In 1993, Hilton was sentenced to six years in prison in California on a dozen counts of grand theft and attempted grand theft and other charges including illegal diversion of construction funds.

by Chris Floyd

The Economist — the veritable Bible of the Anglo-American Establishment – paints a grim portrait of the Iraqi regime installed at the point of American guns: a sinkhole of torture, execution, increasing repression and brazen power-grabs.

The Shia-led government has overseen a ballooning of the country’s security apparatus. Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state.

Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. In particular, they have been targeting leaders of the Awakening Councils, groups of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents and sympathisers, who have helped the government to drive out or capture Sunni rebels who refused to come onside. Instead of being drawn into the new power set-up, many of them in the past few months have been hauled off to prison. In the most delicate cases, the arrests are being made by an elite unit called the Baghdad Brigade, also known as “the dirty squad”, which is said to report to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

There are more details in the full story. However, the Economist is being a bit demure in attributing the current degradation to the machinations of the al-Maliki regime alone. The United States has been deeply, directly and instrumentally involved in the dirty work of the Iraqi regime since the very beginning of the conquest. In fact, the Iraqi security forces whose atrocities are detailed in the Economist were created by the Americans, as I noted in a Moscow Times article way back in August 2003:

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals.”

Perhaps that’s not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime’s new campaign to put Saddam’s murderous security forces on America’s payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush’s Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that’s the word, seems to be that these bloodstained “insiders” will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained “insiders” responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin “Governing Council” – aren’t exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam’s goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they’re certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam’s most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their “disappeared” loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: “No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.” Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

It didn’t take a genius to see, in August 2003, what would happen when the American conquerors began filling the old torture chambers of Abu Ghraib with innocent captives. The International Red Cross later estimated that some 70-90 percent of the thousands of prisoners rounded up by the Americans in Iraq were not guilty of any kind of crime whatsoever, much less any connection to terrorism or the insurgency.

But these tortures — which the Economist does at least mention in passing — are just the tip of a very large slag-heap of atrocities. The United States has also been running its own “dirty squads” from the very start, as we detailed here last year in A Furnace Seal’d: The Wondrous Death Squads of the American Elite.

That post was occasioned by the release of Bob Woodward’s latest lumbering tome from the deepest bowels of the Beltway. As we noted last year:

Woodward revealed — or, rather, confirmed — the existence of what he called the key element to the “success” of Bush’s escalation of the war crime in Iraq: a “secret killing program” aimed at assassinating anyone arbitrarily deemed a “terrorist” by the leaders of the foreign forces occupying the conquered land.

In a TV appearance to puff the book, Woodward celebrated the arbitrary murder, by methods unknown, of people designated “terrorists,” by criteria unknown, as “a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have.” ….

What is most noteworthy about the “revelations” is that they have provoked no controversy at all. The United States admits that it is operating secret death squads in Iraq, and this barely rates a passing mention in the press, and certainly no comment whatsoever on the campaign trail, no debate among the national leadership. And this despite the fact that, as Woodward makes clear, the targets of the American death squads are not merely “terrorists,” as the general public broadly understands the term — i.e., religious extremists in the al Qaeda mold — but anyone arbitrarily designated an “insurgent” or a leader in “the resistance.”

That is, anyone who resists the invasion and occupation of his native land is deemed a legitimate target for a secret death squad. For execution without charges, without trial, without evidence. And this, to Woodward, is “wonderful” and “amazing.” By this logic, of course, the Nazis were fully justified in murdering leaders of the French resistance in World War II. The British would certainly have been justified in sneaking into George Washington’s house and killing the insurgent leader in his bed. (And his wife too, no doubt, as an acceptable level of “collateral damage.”) In fact, Woodward sternly warns members — members, mind you, not just leaders –  of “the resistance” to “get your rear end out of town;” i.e., leave your native land or else be murdered in your bed by secret assassins of the occupying power.

This is the heroic, honorable stance of the American elite in the 21st century. What the Nazis did, we do, and for the same reason: to secure the forcible occupation of a land we conquered through an unprovoked war of aggression.  It is indeed wonderful and amazing that such a state of affairs — such an abyss of depravity — is accepted so calmly by the great and good among us….and by tens of millions of our fellow citizens.

The 2008 post goes on to detail just some of the vast amount of information, readily available in mainstream newspapers and magazines, about the American use of death squads and “paramilitaries” to carry out “extrajudicial killings” of people accused — by someone, somewhere, for some reason or no reason at all — of being “terrorists” or “insurgents,” or “bad guys,” to use the playground parlance so favored by our high priests and their media acolytes. These killings, these “dirty squads,” have been part of the occupation of Iraq since the beginning, as has the systematic use of torture and the unlawful detention of innocent people. That al-Maliki is carrying on the practices and policies of those who put him into power should come as no surprise — not even to the Economist.

from Daily Liberty Research

This is not the first time I’ve seen a story like this, it is apparently typical hiring policy for police in many areas. Let’s face it, they want a dumbed-down police force that’s just smart enough to follow orders. We just can’t have our police thinking too much or questioning procedure!

This story says that the average I.Q. for a cop is 104, if that is accurate it means there are thousands of police with I.Q.’s in the 80-100 range. Is it any surprise then thatincidents of police brutality and abuses upon citizens (as well as the Constitution) are now so frequent?

From Ananova:

A US man has been rejected in his bid to become a police officer for scoring too high on an intelligence test.

Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took an exam to join the New London police, in Connecticut, in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125.

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Mr Jordan launched a federal lawsuit against the city, but lost.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Mr Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

He said: “This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class. I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action and has worked as a prison guard since he took the test.

The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

by Scott Thill, AlterNet

Technology is a double-edged sword, the cliche goes. It can save and even extend your life, but it can also kill you in new and unpredictable ways. In the several years since the Arizona-based Taser International has deployed its terminologically challenging Electronic Control Devices (ECDs), colloquially known as stun guns or simply tasers, what started out as a midrange law enforcement weapon has turned into a surreal nightmare that has gone viral from streets to screens. It’s now to the point that only a hyperreal comedian like Stephen Colbert can make sense of it.

“Nation, our gun rights are always under attack from the bleeding hearts,” he cracked in late July, “and not just the hearts bleeding from a gunshot wound. Thankfully, there’s the taser. It’s the perfect weapon for when you really want to shoot someone, but killing them just seems like overkill.”

Of course, Colbert milked the footage of accidental and purposeful taser victims, the latter being media and law enforcement members who signed up for shock therapy and provided the world with no shortage of hilarious video. But his point was well-taken: Thanks to the taser’s wildfire deployment, classification as non-lethal weaponry and pop-cultural appeal in films, television, comics and even cartoons, cops have nearly lost their minds using it on everyone from children, the elderly, and pregnant mothers to the mentally unstable and physically disabled.

Or have their lost their spines? After all, the police are public servants, and were even once referred to as peace officers, charged with resolving disputes, defusing danger and, when necessary, applying lethal force to keep the public safe. But lately, and thanks partially to the taser’s alleged safety, they have been leaving peace behind in favor of brutalizing innocent civilians with accelerating lunacy. That kind of unarmed diplomacy takes real work, and involves much more than simply firing off electrified darts and wires. But rarely is there a day that goes by without another news entry doesn’t stun, pardon the pun, the senses.

The latest case, as of this writing at least, involves a Syracuse mother who was pulled out her car during a routine traffic stop. She was summarily tasered, cuffed and arrested in front of her kids by an officer who left them behind, alone in their car, while he took her to the station and charged her for resisting arrest, driving five miles over the speeding limit, and disorderly conduct –the diaphanous charge controversially leveled on Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. earlier this year.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who was tasered because she wouldn’t sign her speeding ticket, or the pregnant woman who was tasered at a baptism party thrown by her father, a bible-study teacher who was charged with public intoxication in his own backyard and whose wife and son were also tasered? How about the officer who tasered a pregnant woman while inside the police department?

Or the cop who tasered a girl, no lie, in the brain, because he couldn’t chase her down on foot? Or the one that shoved a taser up a man’s ass in Idaho? Or those who tasered and pepper-sprayed an umbrella-wielding man in a Dollar Store bathroom, and after finding out that he was both mentally disabled and deaf still decided to charge him with resisting arrest, failure to obey a police officer and (of course) disorderly conduct, charges which the on-duty magistrate refused to accept? And don’t forget the belligerent baseball fan, the 72-year old grandmother, the bride and groom tasered at their wedding, the bicyclists who were tased after cops tried to run them off the road. And what about that guy who burst into flames? What about the six-year-old who was tasered after threatening to cut his own leg with a glass? (That’ll teach him!)

And those are the ones that lived. The black man tasered nine times in 14 minutes? Not so lucky.

“You’re picking plane crashes,” argued Steve Tuttle, vice-president of communications and one of Taser International’s founding members, by phone to AlterNet. “We’re not in the business of armchair quarterbacking, and we don’t write the use-of-force policies. That’s left up to individual agencies and the constitutional guidelines. When we see the controversies, we have to take a look at the totality of the circumstances.”

To Tuttle’s credit, he didn’t shy away from the controversies surrounding his company, and even correctly characterized the aforementioned, egregious situations: They are indeed plane crashes, full of human and mechanical wreckage that are nearly impossible to turn away from. And with each new astounding report, they’re bringing more heat onto the already embattled company, whose stock has plummeted nearly 80 percent since 2005. In 2008, Taser had to dish out $5 million in punitive damages after a product-liability suit found the company to blame for improperly informing police that repeated shocks could kill suspects such as Robert Heston, who died after police officers in California tasered him multiple times until he stopped moving. In addition, Taser has settled at least ten cases out of court with not distraught suspects but rather police officers, who wereinjured by tasers during training.

The disturbing developments caught the watchful eye of Amnesty International, which publicly worried that tasers were quickly becoming “tools of routine force.”

“There is plenty of evidence that the use of conducted energy devices now frequently — even routinely — occurs in situations where there is no significant threat to law enforcement officers,” Amnesty International spokesperson Wendy Gozan Brown explained to AlterNet. “Rather than being used as weapons of last resort, police employ tasers without considering the consequences. About 90 percent of the more than 350 people who have died in the U.S. after being shocked with such weapons were unarmed. And in dozens of cases, medical examiners have found CEDs to be a cause or contributory factor of death.”

Read the rest at AlterNet here.